This resultset takes too long

Question

I'm getting about 15k rows from an Access 2003 database using the jdbc odbc driver but when I iterate over my resultset, it's taking about 40 seconds (although spikes to almost 2 minutes in some cases). I'm just wondering if this is a reasonable number to expect for a resultset of this size, and if so, is there any way to optimize this?
My query is a very simple 'select field1, field2...from table1' type of query, so I don't imagine it could be made any more efficient. Here's the code I'm using to get my local disconnected version of the resultset:
while (rs.next()) {
    item = new HashMap<String, Object>();
    for (int i = 1; i <= metadata.getColumnCount(); i++) {
        item.put(metadata.getColumnName(i), rs.getObject(i));
    data.add(item);
} I've also tried forgoing the resultset and using a CachedRowSet, but that seems to take the same amount of time. I've also tried setting the fetch size in both cases, but the improvement was insignificant.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Hey thanks for all of the quick responses. Here's some more info to respond to your questions.
Each row is 5 columns. The item variable is declared just outside of that loop -- I didn't think it mattered much either way. data is a list of maps: ArrayList<Map<String, Object>>. No, I haven't tried setting the initial capacity.
In terms of timing, I'm still convinced it's getting the objects from the resultset that's the big slowdown. The query itself runs in about a second. I modified the following line to see how long the rs.next loop would take, and it cut the time down to just under six seconds:
item.put(metadata.getColumnName(i), "test"); I realize actually getting the object from the result set is probably the most costly operation here, but it shows that creating the other objects isn't the big bottleneck. And like I said, I was having a similar speed issue when using the CachedRowSet.
Any thoughts on how to make this part happen faster? Or am I missing something else here? Thanks again.